Both the central and the state authorities claim that they have learnt from their mistakes, and are geared up to tackle future attacks. but they still have miles to go...
There is one thing union home minister P Chidambaram can flaunt as a major achievement. His ministry has succeeded in activating the Multi Agency Centre (MAC), a coordinating body under the Intelligence Bureau (IB) that is looking into the terrorist threats facingthe country.
The MAC existed on paper before the 26/11 attack, but it was empowered to access and distribute terror threat alerts, received from various intelligence agencies, to all security agencies after Chidambaram took over as the home minister.
The sensational raid on Mumbai could have been averted as there were intelligence alerts about Pakistani terrorists taking the sea route to Mumbai. But the navy failed to act on the Research and Analytical Wing (R&AW) inputs, distributed by the IB, about Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists moving towards the city. The Coast Guard promptly responded to the threat, and beefed up security along the Gujarat coast. But the navy trashed it as an undependable intelligence input. There was no proof that the police in Mumbai were alerted about the threat.
The problem before 26/11 was that the intelligence agencies had no system of vetting the terror inputs, and forwarding them to all the agencies concerned. Ideally, after it intercepted the calls made to and from the satellite phones of the terrorists, the R&AW should have alerted not just the navy and the Coast Guard, bust also the Maharashtra state administration and its police.
That is precisely what the MAC is trying to do, and has succeeded to a great extent. “Undoubtedly the MAC has been one of the biggest successes of our post-26/11 reforms. But we have miles to go,” said a senior source in the security establishment. Today, various intelligence agencies send in their representatives for daily meetings at the MAC. There they share the threat inputs that have been received. They weigh and analyse each one of them in details, and then decide which are to be taken seriously and which to be discarded. The potentially serious threats are then conveyed by the MAC to the security agencies.
The MAC has its state-level subsidiaries — state MACs, or subsidiary MACs (Smac). They do intel coordination at the state level. All Smac centres are linked to the MAC headquarters through secure networks.
If MAC is good news, then the turf war raging within the R&AW is bad news. At least six additional secretaries, all from the Research and Analysis Service (RAS), went on protest leave after the government promoted a junior IPS officer over them. Two of them returned after they too were promoted, but four are still on leave.
“The turf battle is as intense as it was before the Mumbai attack,” said a senior official in the intelligence set up.
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